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Both Rebel and Legalist
What he really needs is genuine freedom and genuine goodness, an unsullied righteousness. What he can’t easily understand is that such goodness and freedom come apart from the law. He’s prepared to pay for it. He’d happily work for it. After all, if he could pay or work for it then he could go on boasting about how good a man he is, even if a rebel. But what confronts him is a freedom so radically free that it not only comes to a man apart from the law but also makes that man free from the law. It even comes with its own language: grace. If this rebel lawyer would truly be free, he must learn an entirely new language. That sounds simple enough until you realize that learning a language requires more than simply acquiring some vocabulary, picking up a few grammatical rules or mimicking a few stock phrases. Nor have we learned a language with fluency when we become pretty good at hearing the language, translating it into our mother tongue, then translating our response back into the new language. No. He’ll have to learn to think in the new language. He’ll have to hear the language of grace as one who all his life has thought and spoken in grace. He’ll have to learn what grace thinks, what grace sees, what grace feels, what grace hopes, and how grace acts–all from inside the world of grace. Only then will he know genuine freedom. For only then will grace teach him to say “No” to ungodliness and worldly passions and to say “Yes” to self-control, uprightness, and godliness in an age full of rebel lawyers.
Read more as Thabiti Anyabwile expalains further here http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/thabitianyabwile/2013/07/09/both-rebel-and-legalist/